THEORY AND PRACTICE OF TANGIBLE USER INTERFACES

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The UI I was thinking about while reading Fishkin, is the Dance Dance Revolution mat. DDR is a dance video game set up in arcades and available on the Playstation, which uses a mat that the player stands on and interacts with. The mat has arrows that are used to go up, down, left, and right when stepped on. This relates directly to the ‘distant’ embodiment, in that players stand away from the screen. Their input on the mat directly affects the game screen in front of them.

The metaphor being implied in this case is body movement directly representing similar body movement of the character in the game. A step forward on the ‘up’ arrow results in the character performing that action and scoring points if done at exactly the right time. Here, the TUI has a direct noun and verb analogy with its virtual counterpart. In this way, the taxonomy was helpful in understanding how we perceive and are intuitively able to use the DDR mat. It’s clear that the designers of the game wanted to provide an easy to learn experience.

I went through an experience recently in the Exploratorium at San Francisco’s Pier 15. It was called the Tactile Dome. The interface of the Dome is unique in that there is no digital recording online nor any virtual means of viewing what is inside. It is something that needs to be experienced first-hand tangibly to understand it. Once inside the Dome, Me and three others walked, crawled, climbed, scuttled, and fell through the pitch black interactive maze with only our hands, ears and nose to guide us. While we were practically blind, the dome gave us the opportunity to stretch our imaginations with its different ‘enclosures’ and experiences. In one, I was on my hands and knees with what felt like grass underneath me and a slight artificial breeze blowing on my face. If I paused and thought about it, I could make myself believe I was in a wide meadow under open skies. My hands and my sense of touch were so sensitive that certain feelings invoked such strong memories. McCullough was right in saying that the hands are “the most closely connected with the mind.” I relied on my hands almost entirely to find the openings that moved our group forward through the maze. I felt and probed everything in front and around me to figure out if it was safe to move ahead and emerge unscathed out the other side. The experience was designed for the users to understand and accept the extent to which our other sensory organs of touch can guide our interpretationof the world around us.

I connected 3 LEDs in parallel and covered them with a diffuser made of styrofoam and bubblewrap. The initial code changes the brightness of the LEDs one at a time through a keyboard input and pulse width modulation (eg: r127). I modified the code so that a user could enter the letters ‘r’, ‘g’ or ‘b’ a number of times to indicate the percentage of brightness that they want that LED to be at. The minimum is 0% and the maximum is 100%, so the users can enter a letter 1 to 10 times to change the value (‘ggg’ corresponds to 30%). I adjusted the code so that entering a letter once turns the LED off. In addition I added the functionality of changing the intensity of multiple LEDs in one line input. The user can specify colors by entering different letters at once (eg: rrgggbbb). If the user doesn’t enter a specific color at all, then that color doesn’t change with that input.

Components:

1 Arduino

1 Breadboard3 LEDs (blue, red, green)

3 Resistors (220 ohms each)

4 Connecting wires

1 Diffuser (3 styrofoam peanuts + 1 bubble wrap sheet)

1 USB Cable

1 Laptop

Code:

char serInString[100];// array that will hold the different bytes of the string. 100=100characters;

// -> you must state how long the array will be else it won’t work properly

Components:

1 Arduino

1 Breadboard

1 LED

1 Resistor (220 ohm)

2 Jumper wires

1 USB cable

1 Macbook pro

Description:

I changed the code of the Blink example so that the red LED lights up for 3 seconds and turn off for 2 seconds on a loop. I connected the Arduino to my laptop and uploaded the code to it. I attached the breadboard with the jumper wires along with the resistor and LED. I then checked that it worked and took a picture (below).

Code:

void setup() {
// initialize digital pin 13 as an output.
pinMode(13, OUTPUT);
}
// the loop function runs over and over again forever
void loop() {
digitalWrite(13, HIGH); // turn the LED on (HIGH is the voltage level)
delay(3000); // wait for 3 seconds
digitalWrite(13, LOW); // turn the LED off by making the voltage LOW
delay(2000); // wait for 2 seconds
}

I came across a new form of drinking vessel during my recent trip to Las Vegas. The Fat Tuesday comes in a long cylindrical tube with expanded ends. The vessel holds a cold slushy-like drink which is sipped through an elongated straw (picture below for reference). While this was my first experience with such an interface for drinking, I was able to understand its usage easily enough because the physical embodiment fit roughly into my mental model as an instance of the abstract class of glasses (Dourish, p21). I further appreciated the tangibility of the cold drink on a warm Vegas night as well as the reduced circumference of the vessel that allowed for a firm grip even in an inebriated state. Through phenomenology, the creators of the Fat Tuesday understood that customers would enjoy the experience of an altered drinking vessel and that was a key part of their value proposition.